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Public Talk: "Doing Feminism in the Network"

Prof. Carrie Rentschler of McGill University's Department of Communication will give a talk as part of the department's colloquium series this semester. The title of her presentation is "Doing Feminism in the Network: Feminist Meme Events and the New Infrastructures of Online Response-Ability." Her talk will take place at 12:00-1:30 p.m. on Friday, May 2, in W25 Machmer Hall. More information about Prof. Rentschler's presentation is below.

This talk examines how feminist internet memes, Twitter feeds, Tumblrs and Amazon review hijackings defuse offline misogyny and critique gendered gaffes such as U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney's 2012 "binders full of women" quip, exploiting the feminist hack value of playful and political exchanges that also disrupt the feminist killjoy stereotype. If the internet is particularly good at facilitating the diffusion of feminist jokes, the networking and distribution capacities of social media also enable new modes of feminist cultural critique and models of political agency. This talk is based on research that Prof. Rentschler and Samantha Thrift are conducting on humorous feminist meme events as new modes of "doing feminism."